It is one thing to be told that you are the new Andrew Flintoff. It is quite another challenge to read that you might replace David Beckham as England's anointed sporting sex symbol. Stuart Broad has had the time of his life at The Oval and that life might never be the same again.

"Over to you, Stuart," said Flintoff yesterday, as he formally passed on the baton. Unsurprisingly there has been no pronouncement from Beckham as yet, but while Broad has been slaying the Aussies, others – in blogs, in newspaper columns and in conversations – have been slayed more by Broad's image than his Ashes statistics. Armani, though, has yet to come calling and Broad is not hanging by the phone. "I haven't got the body to be posing in underwear like Beckham," he said.

That Broad has the qualities to replace Flintoff as England's premier all-rounder is increasingly evident. It took the best part of a decade for the baton to be passed from Botham to Flintoff, so to imagine that England might be about to pull off a perfect handover seems too good to be true. But Broad is ambitious to do just that and he now has a growing fan club to satisfy.

Andy Flower, England's team director, does not sound unduly worried about the attention being heaped upon him. "I think he will become a world class all-rounder but he has a lot of work ahead of him," he said. "We have seen skills with the ball and flashes with the bat. He won't bereplacing Freddie at all. He is very much his own man.

"He has handled himself very well since coming into the England side. He is quite a streetwise young man and he is very competitive and both are good qualities. He has a lot of work to do on his batting but his bowling is coming along nicely."

But it is Broad's sex appeal that has broadened his fan base. As much as he might joke "I don't think they get paparazzi in Nottingham do they?", once he emerges from his Ashes world of "room service, sleeping and playing cricket" he will spot the difference.

"It's an exciting time," he said. "But my mum is a very grounded person and if I put a foot out of line she would tell me. My pure focus is the cricket but if the attention happens then I am not fazed about it.

"I woke up at 10 o'clock with the biggest smile on my face and, if I am a little more famous now, that doesn't help me get runs and wickets. If I do that everything will take care of itself. I would like to think I am a good judge of character. I have some good people around me. Mum is very clued on, my dad thinks he is very clued on. It is the people who supported me at Chester-le-Street in early May in seven layers and a woolly hat who matter."

Broad is not short of ambition. He suggests that to finish his career with a Test batting average of more than 30 and a bowling average of less than 30 would make him "a very happy boy". And when the subject is raised of his growing adulation such as the posters around London Underground using him to promote Maximo he just shrugs and says: "It's a little bit ironic isn't it?"

Instead he lists his real ambitions. "I want to play 100 Test matches for England, I want to be the leading one-day wicket-taker for England, but more importantly I want to win World Cups for England, I want to win Ashes Series in Australia, I want England to be the best team in the world. That prospect is what excites me and helps me get out of bed in the morning when I have bowled 20 overs the previous day and my knees are barking at me."

His willingness to learn was illustrated by his golden spell of five for 37 on Friday afternoon, a 12-over stint that, although nobody dared to admit it at the time, as good as regained the Ashes. On a slow, parched surface, reminiscent of the later stages of a Test on the subcontinent, he bowled off-cutters with skill while the rest of England's pace attack foundered.

And that is where England's former coach Peter Moores, abruptly sacked early in the new year, must share the credit. It was Moores and England's bowling coach Ottis Gibson who took Broad aside on a tour of Sri Lanka and asked him how he would cope on slow and flat pitches that did not suit his routine tactic of bowling at the top of off-stump.

"They said I should experiment in the nets. It opened my mind to what you can do as a bowler. At times my mind needs closing when all you have to do is bang out a length but there are times when you have to change and adapt and it is nice to have that in the locker.

"Midway through the series I wasn't hitting a consistent length. I was searching for wickets and when you do that quality batsmen tend to pick you off. What this series has taught me is that 90% of the time you have to stick to bowling at the top of off-stump and that doesn't change from local cricket to Test cricket."